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Zeroing In on Ticks

An evil genius is the tick, which spreads disease by hiding in the fur of adorable woodland creatures. We freely slaughter the disease-bearing mosquito, but cannot as easily assault the tick because of our love for the white-tailed deer, its dainty, doe-eyed hostage. Instead of culling overabundant herds of suburban deer, we argue over how to subdue them with compassion, by fencing ourselves in, adjusting our gardening techniques or promoting deer family planning. The sturdy tick laughs, and multiplies.

This looks to be another bad tick summer in Westchester and throughout the Northeast. Checking for ticks and taking antibiotics are a way of life in the region. Reports of Lyme disease were up 34 percent last year in Connecticut. On Shelter Island, the Long Island community that has the highest incidence of Lyme disease and other tick-borne ailments in Suffolk County, the term "Shelter Island foreplay" describes nothing naughty but rather the fastidious monkey business of checking one another for ticks before bedtime.

But there may be a way out that satisfies even those who flinch at killing deer. It's known as the four-poster bait station. It was developed by the federal government and works by applying a tick-killing chemical, permethrin, to the heads and necks of deer. Deer are lured to a bin baited with corn kernels. When they stoop to eat, they rub against permethrin-soaked rollers. One station can treat all the deer in about 100 acres, and tests in other states suggest that the invention can do wonderfully devastating things to tick populations.

But there's one big problem: New York does not allow four-poster devices. The Department of Environmental Conservation is not convinced that they are safe or effective, and it opposes feeding wild deer. Feeding deer makes them congregate, which increases the risk of spreading chronic wasting disease, a devastating infection similar to mad cow disease.

The department also warns that dotting the landscape with chemical hot spots may not be such a good idea for children and other living things.

This seems to be a classic collision between worthy aims: protecting health of wildlife and the environment on the one hand, and controlling a public health emergency on the other. Frustrated advocates of four-posters point to the perversity of regulations that forbid the devices but permit homeowners to spray pesticides containing permethrin at will, saturating leaves that deer nibble on and putting ground water at risk. Some on Shelter Island are eagerly awaiting the imminent publication of a five-year, federally financed study they predict will validate the advocates' claims about the safety and effectiveness of four-poster devices.

If that happens, there would seem to be room for a compromise. A place like Shelter Island, whose deer herds are naturally isolated, should be allowed to install four-posters in a carefully monitored experiment. If we can't agree on what to do about the deer, we should at least try to kill the ticks.

A version of this editorial appears in print on , on page WE15 of the New York edition with the headline: Zeroing In on Ticks. Today's Paper|Subscribe